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The Scent of Bliss – Orion

The Official Product Description Sez:The first unabashedly masculine Posset, and the first of The Constellations, Orion is probably the most recognizable star set out there. Possets rendition is woody in extremis but not obnoxiously loud. Very masculinely charming, outdoors in a very sophisticated way, a hard outside with a very warm heart. This one features Oude, rare and unexpected woods and smoked vanilla. Very sexy. If it were a person, it would be Oliver Mellors from Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Characteristics: woody, sophisticated, masculine, spicy, home scent, long lasting.

I was eager to open this up. With a name like Orion, I had all sorts of imaginings in mind – something cold and sparkling as space with a belt of scent through the middle, perhaps, or something lushly wet and vegetative and earth to recall the primordial hunter of legend.

Then I opened the bottle, and it… confused me.

It hit my nose as what I could only term as dry-rub spices – onion and garlic, sugar and salt, oregano, paprika. It’s the kind of thing you’d get in a pre-mixed shaker to put on steaks and chicken to grill, or perhaps run across made fresh in a steakhouse. There was a little something else behind it, a cedar woodiness with a layer of moss. This was far from what I was expecting, and trying not to feel like a plate of steak tips, I put it on.

The scent changed hugely on the skin. The big front note was the sweet, creamy smoothness of cocoa butter, cut through with white pepper, followed by wood and salt and wet mossy log. The dry-down lost the pepperyspices scent entirely, until I was left with a hint of the cocoa butter sweetness, the salt, and the wet wood. I was completely at a loos as to what this could be likened, until I plaintively held out my wrists to SecretAgentLoverMan to inhale, and rattled off the things I was smelling and my frustration at attempting to draw a contextual association.

Boardwalk, he said, and I looked blankly at him. He looked wide-eyed back at me. “That’s RIGHT!” he declared, “You grew up here, with public beaches that you don’t need to pay to get upon!”

He, however, grew up in New Jersey, and with the aid of reminding me of a scene in the movie Lost Boys, he painted for me exactly the picture this scent was trying to offer. Of driving and driving toward the coast and getting out in a hot parking lot and walking to the boardwalk past a steakhouse; someone in the kitchen has dropped the white pepper, and there’s a burst of that and the spices in their cooking. Then you step onto the board walk, and the sun-hot scents hit the nose in a carillon riot of sweet and salt, the sugar of funnelcake and the suntan location of the passersby and on your own skin, and somewhere beyond it is a teasing breeze from off the ocean that has crept over the fences. Not until later, when the night has fallen and the lights come up and you’ve found a spot to jump the fence and run free down the beach, letting the dark surround and the lights fade away to the stars above, the salt wind wrapping around to welcome you while you step over a piece of mossy waterlogged cedar, and Orion’s belt glimmers high above, the hunter’s arrow pointing the way toward the freedom of the seaside night.

Sadly, the scent fades far faster than the image or the memory of such a night.